What the Iranians can teach us about fructose

Aaah the old 'sorry I've not blogged for ages' blog post. I've been on limited internet for a while due to the whole packing-moving-unpacking thing. And to be honest, I've also felt like I don't have anything new to share. Maybe writing about going sugar-free isn't blog worthy. I mean, it seemed like such a big step, a topic which would keep me writing for ages. But turns out that, once past the initial withdrawal and so on, and after trying a few recipes and finding that glucose is nearly as easy to work with as sucrose, it's not such a big deal. It's actually really easy. I've lost nearly 8kg so far, and it keeps going slowly down.

But then again, I do love to write, and so I find myself back here. I was inspired tonight by a study which David Gillespie posted to the Sweet Poison Facebook group. The original study is here. In a nutshell this study showed that high levels of fructose in the diet of men and women in Tehran, Iran was associated with an increased risk of metabolic syndrome, including higher body mass index and abdominal obesity.

Yeah, so? you might be saying. Isn't that the point of this blog, that fructose is bad, bad, bad, and that there is research to prove it? Well, yes, of course. But remember that most of the previous published research in this field has been in rats. And it's easy to dismiss this- a rat is (by definition) not a human. And while there have been other studies on people which showed that the rats were on the right track, they were limited, and open to criticism, for example that they fed people an unrealistic amount of fructose. A 2010 review of research published in the same journal as the new one concluded that "No fully relevant data account for a direct link between moderate dietary fructose intake and health risk markers".

So what we have now is one of the first human (ie, non rat) studies to show strong links between dietary fructose (the fructose that actual humans actually ate as part of their actual normal everyday diet) and metabolic syndrome, independent of age, physical activity, energy intake, dietary intake of other nutrients (eg fat) and BMI (all of which the researchers controlled for in their analysis).

The levels of fructose that this study suggest leads to problems seem quite high: >50g per day. At first glance it may seem like most of us are ok- surely I don't eat more than 50g fructose (100g sucrose), you might say. That's a heck of a lot of sugar. Visualise 22 teaspoons if you can, because that's how much it is. But consider that the average intake of fructose in this study was around 50g. So around half those studied (normal, everyday people) were eating over 50g per day. In their usual diet. And in case you think this only applies to Tehranian Iranians, US figures suggest that on average, Americans eat 55g of fructose per day- again, meaning that around half eat more than this. The data for Aussies is sketchy. In 1995 an Australian Bureau of Statistics survey showed that 20% of Australian energy intake came from sugar (in processed foods, fruit and veg, honey and other sweeteners). 20% of energy intake for a male aged 31-50 is between 104g and 185g per day (in fructose terms, 52-92.5g per day). More current figures are sparse to nonexistent because the ABS no longer conducts this particular survey, but a study being conducted with staff at the Epworth hospital (the SWEET study) may provide more answers (if and when it is published- will be looking out for that one). Preliminary data collected from participants showed that they ate 17 teaspoons per day in added sugars alone. Add in your fruit and veg (these are counted in the fructose total, even if they are healthy!) and I'll bet we are close to averaging the magic (in a bad way) 22 teaspoons.

I can't help but feel that this new study means that David Gillespie and others sounding the warning on fructose like Dr Robert Lustig should take some time out this week to give themselves a little pat on the back and maybe just send a little 'told you so' email to the nay-sayers who have insisted that fructose is fine and dandy like sugar candy. Like the university professors interviewed for this article reassuring the public that sugar is no threat, and that the National Health and Medical Research Council draft nutrition guidelines are being ridiculous for daring to suggest that Australians limit added sugars.

The bottom line is that we (most of us) eat a LOT of sugar. And we can now be more confident that this sugar may be doing us, the humans, and not just the rats, a lot of harm. 

Ghost Stories

Well, I’m back from good old Tas, and Easter is approaching rapidly. Thanks to my recent discovery that it is possible to make my own chocolate, I’m not worried about feeling like I'm missing out on treats this Easter. And let’s be honest, commercial Easter egg chocolate is pretty awful: bland, sugary and gritty (unless you get the really expensive chocolates of course). Surely they are just re-using the same unsold eggs year after year?

Mmmm last year's chocolate...

Egg pic by luigi diamanti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net. I added the recycle symbol though. Wasn't that clever?

Anyway, I started thinking about the way I’ve handled Easter in other years, and from there, it was a natural step to musing about the Ghosts of Diets Past. When I think Diet (with a capital D ie, a structured diet program, as compared to just ‘trying to be good’ with what I eat), I think Weight Watchers. I specifically remember doing the old WW at Easter time one year because I had calculated that I could have two Red Tulip ‘bird eggs’ Easter eggs (candy coated with solid chocolate inner) for 2 (or maybe 3, I can’t remember) WW points. I would save up my points during the day so that I could savor a couple of bird eggs after dinner. 

With these and similar tactics, I’ve ‘succeeded’ with WW twice- both times I lost around 10kg. This is about the same amount I need to lose this time, so why am I not doing this again? The clue is that it worked for me twice. Twice. Meaning that I regained the weight. Meaning that it doesn’t really work, unless my definition of success is to be looking trim and feeling gorgeous for a month or two before slowly regaining what I worked so hard for. Unless I want to pay the WW monthly fee and count points for the rest of my life (I don’t), then I need another answer, and hence I'm trying the whole quitting sugar thing.

Is it just me, though? Am I just too greedy or just not motivated enough, or [insert shortcoming here]? There is evidence that Weight Watchers and similar calorie restricted programs work (for example, here and here. However, the research into these programs is usually very short term. The outcomes they measure are usually after 6 or at the most 12 months. What happens in the longer term? Well here’s a chart from this study which looked at weight loss maintenance up to 5 years after dieting:

Weight loss maintenance years 1-5 post diet. From: Anderson, Konz, Frederich & Wood, 2001

The bottom trend line shows the weight loss over time of people using calorie restricted diets which use normal foods (programs like Weight Watchers, although this program wasn't specifically studied). While they initially lost an average of around 9kg, just two years later they had regained more than half of this amount, and 5 years later they were only 2kg lighter than when they started. This is an average, remember, so for some the weight regained was more than this, for some it was less. The top line shows the trend for people using more extreme diets (very low energy diets usually involving meal replacement with a shake or similar and a very restricted calorie intake). For these guys the initial weight loss was much greater (around 24 kg) but two years later they had also regained more than half of what they lost, and 5 years on the average dieter had regained 13kg.

So, it seems that the diet success story is pretty short-lived for the average weight-loser, it’s not that long before they are in a position where they will probably need to diet again. While there is a lot of research into the reasons behind weight-regain after ‘successful’ dieting, there are few helpful answers. Some studies (here and here are examples) suggest psychological factors, such as satisfaction with the new weight, body/self-image and ability to handle stress as important. But there are also internal metabolic factors to take into account, for example these guys hypothesise that the body’s internal systems are more geared towards gaining weight than losing weight. Neither answer is all that encouraging, but it’s clear that we don’t know the full story, either way. There’s a lot more to learn about how to lose weight and keep it off.

I’m wondering if a key part of the secret (for me anyway) is not to Diet (with a capital D) at all. I’ve found that all this does is make me focus more on food. I spend all day (well, a lot of it anyway) thinking about my next meal, or snack, planning how many points I have, deciding whether I can sneak in a birds egg or not. Weight watching is all well and good, but food watching is counter-productive, in my experience. Then there’s the problem of what happens when the Diet stops.  

I really, really don’t want to say it because it’s so clichéd, but you know I’m leading up to the word lifestyle. As in 'this is a lifestyle, not a diet'. I can’t live with counting calories (or points), watching what I eat all the time, negotiating with myself to keep away from X so that I can have Y, but...turns out I can live without sugar. At least, so far. It may sound strange to anyone who feels that giving up sugar would be a major hassle, but the sugar free thing has been far, far easier to live with than WW or any other Diet I’ve tried. I’m past craving sugar now. I don’t find that I am looking for snacks between meals or after dinner. I’m not actively watching my portions but I’m sure I’m eating less. Even with the chocolate and coconut cake and the full fat milk and the cheese (oh, the cheese!), yada yada, I’ve lost a few kilos in a few weeks. I’m not dieting (sorry, Dieting), I’m just living sugar free.

Can I lay the Ghost of Diets Past to rest forever? I don’t know, but I’m hopeful.

Boring necessity or faithful friend?

I promised it and here it is: a fibre-themed post. I know, I know, when it comes to nutrition, you can’t get any more boring than fibre. But trust me, like the Transformers, there’s more to fibre than meets the eye. Plus this is a short post, so it's easy to digest.

Digest, geddit?

Ahem. Anyway, I’m not historically a fibre-phile. I hardly ever ate lentils or wholemeal pasta (brown pasta, eurgh). I’ve often been baffled as to how to include veges in the meals I made for the family (the answer: microwave some frozen peas!). And even though I knew that yes, fibre is good for me yada yada, I wasn’t convinced it was as groundbreaking and important as nutritionists would have me believe. So I said, ‘yeah ok’ and then I switched to wholemeal bread. What, that wasn’t enough?

With my new hat on as (very) amateur armchair nutritionist, here’s what I've learned- fibre is a gem when it comes to nutrition and health. But that’s the conclusion, and I have to start at the beginning. Before I start though, I have to warn that once you start reading up about this sort of topic you’ll come across some definitely undelicious sounding words, like ‘gastric emptying’, and ‘fermentation in the intestine’. I’ll try to keep these at a minimum in my short-cut explanation of things below. Excuse me if I go too far in the other direction and refer to your ‘tummy tum’. I have a one year old at home so it’s hard to judge sometimes.

Firstly, fibre comes in soluble and insoluble forms, and they don’t have the same effect on the body. Insoluble fibre adds bulk to what you eat, which fills your stomach up quickly, making you feel physically full (I’ve explained more about fullness in my previous post). Insoluble fibre also speeds the movement of food through the digestive system. It’s the fibre that you associate with, um, number twos. It’s the fibre that Darren Hinch wanted us to try in the All Bran challenge.

Soluble fibre is the fibre that is...soluble. Well, technically it absorbs water rather than being ‘dissolved’ in it, and it becomes viscous –gooey or gummy according to my thesaurus, yuck – and this not only helps add a physical feeling of fullness to your tum, but also slows the digestive process, meaning that your stomach doesn’t get empty quickly. (Yep, I mean gastric emptying is delayed- gross!).

But other than slowing things down, digestion-wise, soluble fibre seems to be the good fairy of many body processes which affect our health. It slows the absorption of glucose, which means that you don’t get a sudden blood sugar spike from eating carbohydrates if you also eat soluble fibre. It lowers cholesterol and does good things to your intestines. Things you probably don’t want to know about, but which you should be grateful for all the same. New research suggests that fibre plays a positive role in your immune system, somehow changing inflamed immune cells into anti-inflammatory, healing cells. So instead of being sick little cell-patients, they have been inspired by fibre to become  tiny cell-doctors. How cute. (I'm glad it doesn't take them 7 years of training though. But then, I wouldn't want under-qualified cells running around my immune system either). Well anyway, here’s the news report version of this study which is far more understandable than the original research article.

In other words, eat more soluble fibre, you won’t regret it.

If you look for fibre on the nutrition information panels of foods, you will notice that soluble and insoluble fibres are lumped together under ‘dietary fibre’. This is because the dietary reference intake for fibre (25-30 grams per day) is for both types combined. On the one hand, this makes sense because many foods that are high in fibre include both insoluble and soluble, so you may as well count both together. On the other hand, lots of foods that I think of as ‘high fibre’ are biased toward one type of fibre, with hardly any of the other. If you are eating wholemeal bread to increase your fibre intake, you are increasing your insoluble fibre intake, and getting very little soluble (0.08 grams per slice). An apple has both, but more soluble (2.3 grams) than insoluble (1.6 grams). If you’re interested, here’s a website with a handy breakdown of the soluble and insoluble fibres in different types of food. Thanks internet! 

So, fibre. I’m sorry I ignored you. You seemed boring, but you are not. Let’s be friends.

I’m off to Tasmania tomorrow. The Apple Isle- how appropriate! Also home of Lactos, wondrous purveyors of delicious cheese. Oh and also family. Point is, I won’t be blogging for a few days :)

Whatever doesn’t fill you, makes you...hungrier?

19 days in! I'm feeling good. Not great, but good. Sleep is definitely not my friend at the moment, and I’m not sure what that’s about- maybe a withdrawal side effect, maybe nothing to do with this sugar-free life. On the craving side, not much to report, which is a plus (although as I typed that, I suddenly really wanted licorice, really badly, damn).

Here’s another plus: I’ve definitely felt fuller lately, even though I'm eating less. Strange, but true. Of course I’ve changed quite a few things about my diet. I’ve cut almost everything sweet out (except fruit and veg of course) because if it’s sweet, it’s most likely sugared. I’ve also added fat back into my diet: no more ‘low fat’ versions for me. And along the way I’ve also probably added more fibre as well through fruit and veg and other healthy stuff.

I wanted to look at the whole fullness thing in more detail because I don’t really understand it. Why do different foods make us feel ‘full’?  Is there a magic combination of foods which will help me to feel not just full of food but satisfied and not looking around for more? Or do I just need more self-control to stop me licking the plate clean and then helping myself to the post-dinner TimTam?

There are two parts to determining how much we eat at a meal. If something is delicious, we eat more of it. (mmmm licorice...stop that). So our perception of food and the positive feedback we get from eating is really important. We also get feedback from our bodies, telling us when to stop. As these guys point out, to reduce your energy intake you either have to decrease the ‘morishness’ of your food, or increase the feedback from the body (or your response to that feedback) that stops you eating.

Eating boring food might be a great way of reducing your meal size and (in the long term) your weight, but try serving your family a couple of boiled parsnips for dinner tomorrow and see what they think about this idea (feedback can be posted below!) Perhaps our tastebuds are spoiled brats with all the food choices that we have, perhaps we just have too much (inborn? socially developed?) expectation that food should taste good, not bad. Either way, I’m not convinced that it’s plausible long term to work on energy intake by eating only unappealing food.

Nope, it’s going to have to be up to the body on this one- so, what can you do for me, digestive system? Turns out it can do quite a lot, but in the interest of keeping this post readably short, here is the cutback version of some processes which are far, far too complex for me to understand with just some light reading in my spare time. But, keeping to the shallows, I’ve gathered a few interesting facts for your edification.

The most obvious signal to stop eating is the physical feeling of fullness in your stomach as it fills up with all that yummy food. If you get through the entree and main and feel like you are bursting, this is your stomach trying to say ‘hey, don’t get dessert on my account, I’m done here’. Fibre is great at filling the stomach, but fat and protein also play a role. (I’ve learned some great things about fibre while researching this, but I’ll save that for another day. Bet you can’t wait!). The body doesn’t just rely on the ‘full’ feeling to make you stop. A hormone called Cholecystokinin (which is also helpfully called CCK, a far easier-to-type name) is stimulated in the small intestine, particularly if you eat a lot of fat and protein. CCK helpfully sends a signal to the brain to say ‘enough already’, just a brief message to get us to stop for this particular meal. We have the ability to ignore or overcome this signal and keep eating, and we regularly do. It’s a handbrake rather than a tire clamp. Stimulating CCK during one meal has little effect on what you eat for the rest of the day (as I read here), but may make us more sensitive to the full feeling in future meals. There is an article specifically about this hormone here if you are interested.

Another important hormone in helping us put the fork down is leptin. Leptin is made primarily in your fat stores, and the greater your love handles, the more leptin is whirling around the body, which should mean that you eat less. Leptin seems to be the body’s way of keeping tabs on your nutritional status. It sends ongoing messages to the brain saying ‘hey there, no need for big, high energy meals right now, there’s plenty of fat to get us through winter’ (I’m paraphrasing, of course). If there’s a lot of leptin, it also increases the amount of energy you burn. What a gem- I love this little guy!

The catch is that it seems we can become resistant to the effect of leptin. In fact, to quote these researchers, “Most forms of obesity are associated with diminished responsiveness to the appetite-suppressing effects of leptin”.  You knew I couldn’t go a whole post without mentioning fructose- my sweet nemesis- so here it is. When fructose is processed by the liver, the liver produces triglycerides. These fatty little fiends have been shown to block the uptake of leptin in the brain, meaning that while the leptin is talking, the brain isn’t listening.  These researchers showed that this leptin resistance can develop without any outward sign (such as weight gain)- until we also start eating high calorie meals- then BAM! we gain serious weight because leptin is not able to tell the brain what is going on. If this is true, then eating high calorie food in conjunction with fructose is a recipe for obesity. And fructose is terribly easy to eat.

I'll just mention as well that there seem to be important links between leptin and CCK, including evidence that if either hormone is reduced or blocked, then the other doesn't work as well as it should.

So there you have it, a whistlestop tour of how your body wants to help you [insert pic of Uncle Sam in your imagination]. There are a bunch of processes, hormones and signals that we as choice-wielding humans can listen to or ignore, and a bunch of foods which can turn the volume up or down. And if this all feels too complex, there is always the boiled parsnip option :)

Keep on moving

Nature (plus or minus nurture) has not made me an exercise junkie. I don’t belong to a gym (paying all that money seems pointless since I don’t go), and most of my exercise at the moment comes from bursts of walking, pushing my son in his pram. (In case you think this is a wimpy form of exercise, I should add that my son weighs more than 10kg- it’s no picnic to push him up a hill). But I should add that this is not an everyday thing. Sure I push the pram around when we do errands, but what I consider real ‘exercise’ (specifically walking for say 40 minutes to an hour as aerobic exercise) is not my idea of fun. I easily avoid it. After all, I’m a busy full-time mum. Who has time to exercise?

Since I’m going to the extent of quitting sugar in the quest to lose weight, I may as well be thorough about this and work out the exercise question. I need to know whether I have to say, join a gym (and actually go), or make sure I’m out pounding the pavement pushing the pram every day, or something else in order to lose weight.

Well to start with, research has pretty consistently shown little or no effect of exercise alone on weight. That’s exercise like going to the gym, jogging, power-walking, cycling, or playing sports. These reviews (here and here) showed that on average, people who exercised didn’t lose weight when compared to those who did nothing. Plus, those who dieted AND exercised only lost (on average) a tiny amount more than those who just modified their diet. This seems a bit unfair. Surely exercise, as horrid as it is, should be rewarded? Why doesn't it work?

Turns out we burn very little energy through exercise. 40 minutes of moderate intensity aerobic exercise might feel like hard work (unless it is Zumba, then it will feel like a party!), but after all that sweating you have only burned the equivalent of one piece of chocolate cake, or 3 scoops of vanilla icecream, or a single piece of apple pie. Damn. And then there is the possibility that you will want to eat that pie more, because you went to the gym. Studies like this one show that some people compensate for the energy they lose by eating more. Oops.  These researchers showed that adolescents who increased their physical exercise also increased their energy intake by 100 calories more than they burned in the exercise (on average). And the more intense the exercise, the greater the compensation may be, according to this research. 

There is also research to show that when we do intensive exercise we may reduce our movement throughout the rest of the day to compensate. These UK researchers compared the overall physical movement of kids from a private school who had nearly 2 hours of PE per day to kids at schools with PE for about 2 hours per week. The children wore ActiGraphs which measured the amount and intensity of their movement. Guess what- the children in all three schools moved about the same amount and at about the same intensity. The organised PE did nothing to increase overall activity of the kids because those children simply moved less at other times. I knew there was a good reason that I didn’t like PE.

It seems exercise is not for everyone, because, to quote these guys, ‘some individuals do not experience the beneficial effects of exercise on body weight’. Some of us compensate (unconsciously, by the way), and this negates all the benefits in terms of energy loss. Well, well. Yep, that’s me. 

Of course our great-grandparents didn’t go to Curves. They may have pushed babies in prams but they didn’t do it for ‘exercise’. They did it as part of everyday movement. They moved more than we did and perhaps this simple ‘moving more’ is the answer to managing weight without accidentally tripping the switch that tells our bodies to compensate with more food or more rest. This great article in Time Magazine summarises some of the latest thinking in relation to exercise and weight loss and points out that many of the benefits from exercise like improved cognitive abilities and overall health are shown based on low-level, everyday movement (like hanging out the laundry, taking the stairs instead of the lift and carrying the groceries to the car) and not on vigorous or even moderately vigorous exercise.

So...it seems it is ok to say that going to the gym or even pushing myself to power walk with the pram for ‘exercise’ will not help me lose weight. Hurray! It’s really a freeing thought. I may one day find a sport or physical activity that I love, and if I do it for fun, health and maybe fitness, then I'll be fine. I probably shouldn't do it for weight loss though.  

For now, I think I need to concentrate on moving more in my daily life. This will (hopefully) help my body burn energy without triggering the need for compensation. It will also be healthier than couch-potato-ness. So, I’m going to try to increase the amount that I move around and to build this into daily life. Rather than trying to convince myself to exercise, rather than planning (and then avoiding) exercise, I’m just going to move. 

I'll keep you updated on how this goes!

Fat versus fiction

I hope my research-y posts aren’t boring anyone that reads this. I’m finding it really fascinating to look into some of these things for myself- I think it’s the first time I’ve thought about nutrition in detail, even though I’ve thought about food, a lot. Feel free to post comments if you have any. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I posted last about sugar and weight gain, but I can’t ignore the fat we eat when thinking about weight. I have always thought fat had more to do with weight problems than sugar. So, I use low fat milk, eat low fat cheese, ignore the crispy skin on my roast chicken and the delicious crackling on my roast pork. I limit gravy, fatty sauces, and fried foods. I choose the low fat tomato-y pasta sauce when we eat out, instead of the creamy sauce- I don’t think I’ve ever ordered the carbonara. I usually avoid things like potato chips for snacks, choosing lollies instead. Of course I sometimes eat high fat things (delicious camembert cheese springs to mind), but not without feeling guilty. But despite living this low fat lifestyle (with a few slip ups), I’m overweight. Boo. What to do about it? (Ignoring the obvious exercise question for the moment). Should I reduce the fat in my diet even more?

Doctors, nutritionists and the government have told us for many years that fat maketh the man (and woman) fat. We have been encouraged to keep our fat intake low, and as a result of this have increased our carbohydrate intake. After all, we need to get energy from somewhere, so we should ‘eat more breads and cereals’ as Norm learned in the Life Be In It ads of the 1980s (which you can revisit here if you like, thank you YouTube!) In case you think things have changed, here is Nutrition Australia’s current healthy food pyramid. Fats are in the top teeny part, and we are supposed to use even ‘low fat’ spreads sparingly. Although sugars share the top tiny portion (ie, we are supposed to keep our intake low), a study in 1994 showed that Australians who had the lowest fat diets had the highest intake of refined and natural sugars, not to mention alcohol. Oops. This won't surprise any of you who have already realised that most (if not all) foods manufactured to be ‘low fat’ have more sugar than their full-fat brothers. The sugar is added to make us think they taste nice, isn’t that great? As sugar has about half the calories per gram than fat, they can take out say 1 gram of fat and replace it with up to 2 grams of sugar without affecting the calorie content. So, a low fat meal is often a high sugar meal. Sneaky bastards.

As a former fat-a-phobe (phobic of fatty food, that is) I’ve come to realise that unlike sugar, fat is not an ‘empty’ source of calories. Fat is necessary for the body because:
• It provides essential fatty acids
• It helps us to absorb vitamins such as A, E and K which are fat-soluble
• Our nerve fibres are insulated by fat, and fat helps to transmit nerve messages
• Our cells all include some fat, which helps to transport nutrients from cell to cell
• It helps our bodies to recognise when we have had enough to eat.

This isn’t all that fat does either. Fat is essential. Given the list above, a low fat diet starts to look a bit, well, stupid. Or, if that’s too harsh, then at least short-sighted, since we decrease one of the things that helps us to feel full and stop eating. On the other hand, there is evidence (for example, this study) showing that the fructose in sugar actually decreases our body’s ability to recognise when we are full by interfering with a hormone called leptin. So, fat says stop, but sugar says 'more'. I’ll look into that one in more detail later.

What about ‘bad’ fats- ie, saturated fats- surely I should at least be avoiding those? The Australian Heart Foundation suggest on their website that Australian’s decrease their intake of saturated fats because they lead to an increased risk of heart attacks and stroke. This has been the mantra of nutrition experts since about the 1960s, but is directly contradicted by a review published in the world’s top nutrition journal in January of last year which showed  that “there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD [coronary heart disease, which can lead to heart attacks] or CVD [cardiovascular disease which can lead to strokes]”. This finding came from a meta analysis of research, which is a combination of the studies in an area so that instead of say 10 smallish studies with say 10 participants each you combine the data to get the results for all 100 participants. This meta analysis included 21 studies spanning 29 years and had 347,747 participants. One of the co-authors,when interviewed by the Boston Globe put it this way: 'There is no evidence that cheese causes heart disease'. Hurrah!

So, I have started to make my peace with fat. It's been trying to do me some good, and I've been willfully misunderstanding it and trying to avoid it all this time. I’m having full-fat milk again, I think for the first time in my adult life, and I am loving it. It’s delicious! (Just as an aside, back in the day I remember this being called full cream milk- is it just me, or have we started to give it a much more negative sounding name- full fat??). I’ve completely stopped looking at the fat content of food before eating it. I feel like a rebel just saying that.

David Gillespie’s experience and that of others who have quit sugar using Sweet Poison has been that they get full easier and they stay full longer. They report that they feel the ‘fullness’ in a much more potent way than before. This might be something to do with letting fat do it’s job of letting us know when we’ve had enough, unhampered by sugar sneakily turning off the ‘I’m full’ button and triggering the ‘more please’ switch.

Well, I’m not there yet, so I’m off to eat some cheese, but it will definitely be minus the guilt :)

Mostly harmless?

I know my last post was long, sorry. I’m new to blogging :)

Ok, so sugar is addictive. Check. Is it bad though? Since I was initially impressed with the idea of going sugar free because I need to lose some weight, I want to look at whether sugar can be implicated in being overweight. This would definitely tip the scales (ha ha) toward sugar being bad, in my opinion.

Here’s what I used to think about how sugar affected my weight. To gain weight, you just need to eat more calories than you use (and to lose weight, you do the opposite, obviously). Sugar provides energy (adds calories), and because they are ‘empty’ calories (sugar doesn’t provide any other micronutrients that the body needs), by eating those jelly babies I am using up my precious daily allowance of calories on something that doesn’t have any nutritional value. Such was my understanding, and I don’t think it is necessarily wrong, it’s just incomplete.

Sugar is 50% fructose, 50% glucose. These two parts aren’t processed in the same way by the body, and they don’t result in the same outcomes in terms of our weight. Research has shown that if you increase people's calorie intake with fructose, you get visceral adiposity- that’s a big tummy- which is a strong and well-validated indicator of risk for chronic diseases including cancers, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes. This is why the Australian Government are trying to get you to Measure Up. (Just out of curiosity, I checked what the Measure Up site suggested I do about reducing abdominal fat- they suggest eating less. Thanks). You don’t get this dangerous fat when you increase the calorie intake with glucose instead of fructose. It’s not just about the calories.

Fructose is processed by the liver. The liver sends fat to the tum and triglycerides (fat again) into the blood (triglycerides are implicated in coronary artery disease- hurray, more to worry about!).  Let’s see what this does to rats. An Editorial in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition summarises years of research nicely: 

experimental studies in animals have shown that fructose can induce most features of the metabolic syndrome, including insulin resistance, elevated triglycerides, abdominal obesity, elevated blood pressure, inflammation, oxidative stress, endothelial dysfunction, microvascular disease, hyperuricemia, glomerular hypertension and renal injury, and fatty liver. These effects are not seen in animals pair-fed glucose or starch, which suggests that the mechanism is not mediated by excessive caloric intake.

Ouch. So, fructose makes rats not just fat, but really, really unhealthy. And this is not because it ‘adds’ calories. Yes, those calories (if not used) will be stored as fat whether the rat eats glucose, starch or fructose, but you don’t see the cascading, overwhelmingly bad outcomes, some of which directly impact on weight, for glucose or starch.

There is a growing body (ha ha) of research to suggest that fructose leads to these outcomes in humans as well as rats, including the study I mention above. It is messy, though. Some researchers flat out deny that there is evidence for a link between fructose and the types of symptoms (including weight gain) that are evident in rats. Others say things like “there is compelling evidence that very high fructose intake can have deleterious metabolic effects in humans as in rodents”  (emphasis added). Finally, there are people like Dr Robert Lustig who used to work for the American Heart Foundation (including co-authoring their sugar guidelines) and who now unequivocally believes that sugar is the main culprit behind overweight and other problems. This is a good summary of what he thinks.

They can’t all be right. We obviously have more to learn. David Gillespie (in the Sweet Poison Quit Plan) says that there are over 3000 studies which confirm that sugar makes you fat (I haven’t counted them myself but I’ll take his word). Some of these are on rats or other non-human subjects, but there are many on humans as well.

This isn’t the end of the story about sugar and weight by any means, but I’ll leave it here for now. I’ll put my hand up and say that I believe that sugar is more- maybe way more- than an empty calorie. I don’t pretend to know exactly what it does, but 8 days in, I feel fantastic and very positive about having cut it out of my life. I've lost over a kilo already. 

So, if sugar is an empty calorie, then my body won’t miss it: I never needed the Party Mix (I just thought I did). And, if it’s more sinister than that, then I’m much better off without it.